Software

The natural choice for a comparison with Ada95's AnnexE would have been a CORBA implementation for Ada. There is already an OMG (Object Management Group) Language Mapping for Ada ([6]) available. However, Ada is not very popular in the Freeware world and therefore very few free CORBA implementations exist. The only ones I found are in early development stage ([9]), or rely on an implementation in another language ([10]).

In order not to introduce another programming language I decided to use a Java implementation. There are several free ([14], [15]) and free for non-commercial use ([11]) implementations available. I decided for ORBacus ([11]) because of the good documentation and extensive thread model support. See CORBA Comparison Project ([12]) for a comparison with other ORBs.

So, our software environment included

• JDK 1.2

• ORBacus 3.3[1][1][1][1]

Comparing Test results of Java, which usually is converted into bytecode that runs in a virtual machine, and Ada, a compiling language, may be difficult because the program in the virtual machine runs slower. But I don't think this will be a big issue here because

• we use no highly computational code and

• modern virtual machines with JIT (Just In Time) compilers are reasonable fast.

If I think that language specifica are responsible for major differences I will explain them.